Purchasing Information

Cisco UCS servers may be purchased either as a single Cisco Collaboration SKU or a set of Cisco Data Center SKUs. See UCS page at http://www.cisco.com/go/swonly for details.

Cisco field and channel partners may also consult the "UC on UCS" chapter of the User Connect Licensing Ordering Guide.

Required VMware may be purchased either as a single Cisco Collaboration SKU, a set of Cisco Data Center SKUs or from VMware or other 3rd-party (including leveraging an existing customer site license or enteprise license). For details, see VMware Requirements link.

Cisco field and channel partners may also consult the "UC on UCS" chapter of the User Connect Licensing Ordering Guide.

There is no change to how UC applications are purchased. User Connect Licensing, Unified Workspace Licensing and UC Software Subscription are all the same for both virtualized (UC on UCS) and non-virtualized (MCS 7800) deployments.

Note that virtualized (UC on UCS) deployments require submission of a Product Authorization Key (PAK) derived from a "licensing MAC". For CUCM, you can generate a "licensing MAC" at http://www.cisco.com/web/cuc_afg/index.html.

If VMware is purchased from Cisco, the only that is shipped is a paper licensing agreement containing a Product Activation Code (PAC) and a VMware.com link with instructions on how to submit the PAC and receive a VMware license file. All VMware media and docs are posted online at VMware.com - these are not physicall shipped.

Server shipments are managed the same for both UCS and MCS 7800 servers.

Implementation

The Answer File Generator utility creates answer files for unattended Cisco Unified Communications installations. If your primary node will be installed on a virtual machine, this utility will also generate a virtual License MAC to be used when you request licenses.

Operations

Virtualized deployments (UC on UCS) are not an appliance, and the user experience for management and serviceability are slightly different.

Each solution component (server/storage, VMware, UC app) has its own set of management layers and tools. For management tasks that involve native hardware, all three will need to be touched. For tasks that only involve the UC app and do not involve native hardware, existing UC app tools and interfaces suffice.

For UC on UCS, certain kinds of hardware alerts are only available via CIM format - see Supported Hardware link for more details.